Experience With Emergency Response Planning and Rotor Flux Monitoring to Improve Generator Reliability

In today’s commercial environment, unplanned outages have a significant affect on revenues, and hence reliability, availability and maintainability of plant are key factors. Emergency Response Planning, combined with real time monitoring can have significant beneficial impacts on unplanned and planned outage duration’s. This paper details our company’s experience of Emergency Response Planning (ERP), giving detailed overview of how this is achieved and the benefits that can be obtained. The paper focuses on unit disaster recovery of large turbo-alternators and how the concept of Emergency Response planning can reduce unplanned outage duration’s, including the steps required to implement best practice. The paper uses a detailed a case study of a 1200MW, 4-pole generator with severe rotor winding inter-turn faults and associated vibration problems to demonstrate how a combination of condition monitoring, Emergency Response Planning, and a skilled repair team have been used to implement an effective maintenance strategy. The benefits to the customer have been detailed. The successful repair of all faults and the significant reduction in generator vibration levels without the requirement for any site balancing is illustrated on return of the unit to service. The paper details how Rotor Flux Monitoring (RFM) has been identified a series of winding faults and with ERP has mitigated areas of high risk within this turbo-generator.